


What is gained in what is given up

by jtsbar



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-26
Updated: 2011-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:18:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jtsbar/pseuds/jtsbar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What passed between Sherlock and John in that glance?</p>
            </blockquote>





	What is gained in what is given up

If there had been anyone watching, anyone who was not focused on keeping the red dots dancing over their hearts (aim for center mass, no matter where you hit you will put your target on the ground – John could attest to this from both sides of the bullet), or anyone who is not by any objective measure insane, the person watching would have said the two men had, in the less than seconds required, in the space of a glance between them, agreed to give up everything. 

Their lives, their bodies (skin will open, release breath, organs, muscle, blood – enough to turn the pool red, it does not take that much, the percentage by volume can be quite small, and yet all that will be seen is red). 

Thoughts, memories, all the experiences - what would they in that moment cherish, what would they regret, of their thirty-odd years apiece on this earth? 

The ones they had loved? 

Had there been enough, for a lifetime? 

Parents, siblings, of course, though difficult, it had still been what had to be called love, really no choice there at all. 

Past days, months, years, the few other bodies they crossed boundaries of skin and self with, traded breaths with, is giving up their memory really so difficult?

After all, we relinquish so much every moment we live, don't we, passing further and further from what was once right in our hands? 

The future though, so tenuous despite one's most careful plans, most intense hopes, giving that up might feel rather more impossible. 

Especially when its impending loss floods all the particular disappearing possibilities with such searing light. 

What passed between Sherlock and John in that glance? 

Any acknowledgment of what might have come to be? 

Why should it, when the necessity before them fused past and future into one answer, when what they were together at that moment was more than anyone watching could expect.


End file.
